Adobe's Flash player has been around from the earliest days of the World Wide Web. As a platform for developing and showing animation on the web, the existance of Flash has helped propel some of the most significant innovations in the medium of the web. Love Flash or not, the mediums of human communications were advanced by it.
Flash has always had its issues, from esoteric arguments about its openness as a standard platform for human communications to more mundane matters of compatitibility, security, and performance.
Flash has never been truly open to the world. The inner workings of the Flash player plugins have been closed and exclusive to its programmers -- first at Macromedia and then at Adobe. And, when a closed set of programmers controls important code like Flash, a platform myopia ensues that almost invariably leads to incompatibility and performance problems. Flash has suffered in this way. (The exceptions to this rule do exist, but they are few.)
The company that owns Flash, Adobe, has always exhibited a deep and abiding sense that they know better than the rest of us. This shows up traditionally in the gross overpricing of their software tools so that none but the elite can use them, all the while they try to coerce the rest of us into using their more and more bloated and insecure readers and players.
It all seems to be coming to a head now in a surprising "we're mad as hell" moment, where Adobe is being told, essentially, clean up and open up your act or the rest of us will just stop using your stuff.
The "rest of us" being spoken for, in this case, by Apple Computers and Microsoft. But, even though Microsoft and Apple are competitors to Adobe in the animation platform arena, they really are saying what needs to be said to Adobe. It is time for Adobe to get off its high horse and listen up about performance and security. Period. There is no or else. They will simply be replaced when the real rest-of-us move on. In the case of Flash, with other players and with the new, open standards-based features of HTML5. And if they don't watch their step with security and gouging prices and performance bloat, their lock on PDF and graphic software is going next.
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